Google Analytics // Check Your Site Speed

Oh-kay. I feel like a bit of a tit writing this post, because I know how important site speed is but I know I’m totally guilty of not paying attention to it and taking the steps to reduce my site speed.

It is something I need to sit down and spend an afternoon or so on, but I’ve not had chance yet, apart from a few posts that were loading slow – mainly due to many images that needed compressing within the post as well as my header and bio picture.

If your site is slow loading, it’s going to frustrate users and possibly cause them to leave your site and not bother coming back, increasing your bounce rate. Because your site speed has an impact on the experience of a visitor, Google will often rank sites that load faster higher than a slower one in search rankings.

See SEO Guide for 2016 for more details.

Using Google Analytics To Reduce Your Site Speed.

Using Google Analytics, you can view your site speed, individual page speed, how this differs per country, browser and page, as well as some ways you can improve your site speed.

Open up your Google Analytics and go to behaviour -> site speed – > performance.

Here you see how long it takes your site to long, as well as delve in a little further.

I’m not going to go into detail of what each thing actually means as it’s not important for what we’re going to do today. What we’re focusing on is Average Page Load Time.

Woah, mine’s a whooping 22.19 seconds on the samples it’s taking the data from. I have a hard job ahead of me!

If you go to Page Times section, you can then see a break down of your most popular pages and how they load compared with your sites average.

As you can see, I have 2 pages that are bringing my whole average down. Let’s click into my April Blog Stats post and take a closer look.

As you cam see, there’s a big spike where it was taking ages to load on one day. So I’m not too concerned over all.

Looking at it by browser, it seems as if Safari (in-app) and Firefox have a hard time loading my site. Though the Safari (in-app) metric doesn’t surprise me, because I always find any site that loads from Facebook through Safari is often so slow I give up. I’m pretty convinced Facebook do it on purpose to make people spend more time on Facebook. Ha.

What we want to focus on, is the ‘PageSpeed Suggestions’ tab.

This gives you a break down of your most popular pages, it gives you the load time, the number of suggestions there are to make it faster and a score. The higher the score means there’s less room for improvement.

If you click on the page suggestions, it will analyse the page and tell you what you need to fix and how to fix it to get a higher page speed on Desktop and Mobile

 

You can then click into ‘Show how to fix’ to see what you need to do to get your score higher, making your site faster.

Here, it might be worth getting familiar with how your readers are viewing your blog, linking it in with bounce rate and pages per session to see if there’s any links!

Have a look and see how your site is loading!

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